pc to play video games without freezing

kinaho

I recently bought Dell Dimension E521 pc {AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ ,2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz [2x1024] Memory, 256MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 Pro graphics card }.The main reason I bought new pc is to avoid slow pc and the old one kept freezing while playing games.I thought this would be good enough to play video games for my son.
Now I find even this one freezes some time.I don't know why?Do I need to upgrade/add anything into this new pc?what makes a good gaming machine with a resonable cost?and avoid frozen pc? I would be very grateful for the suggestions.

Browntoa

initially I'd go to windows update

http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp

and make sure that Xp is up to date do it once and make sure you have all the "express" updates, then go back a 2nd time and click on custom and do any hardware updates, particularly graphics card ones and directx updates under software if it's there

what game freezes ??

IvanOpinion

The X1300 isn't exactly a market leading performance graphics card but it should still be powerful enough to play modern games (especially given rest of the configuration). At a guess it may be because you have so much crud running in the background that it is causing the PC to stall (e.g. virus detectors, anti spam, anti ad, spybots etc.). Try running a defrag.

I would also recommend only loading one or two games onto the computer at any point of time .. pick the ones that you currently want to play and load them, play them and then uninstal them before loading the next game.

One other thing to check, (in my experience) Dells have a habit of popping their capacitors which can cause them to sporadically freeze. Have a look at the capacitors on the motherboard .. the top should be flat. If you find one that is domed up then that might be the problem.

Ivan

culpepper

If its a particular game,can you change the settings by lowering them a bit?
My son plays a lot of games and his sometimes freezes when it gets too hot.
Is the radeon card supported by all the games he plays,it should say so in the game specs.

shutton54321

Whats the wattage of the power supply your using? And is the system properly cooled?

kinaho

Thank you very much for the suggestions.i will try to check it

nelly_2

Most games 'self set' the graphics I have noticed these days, so its rearly graphics overload but try turning them down anyway just incase someone has manually set them to higher than your system can handle